In order to be able to make decisions we need to be informed. Whether we are informed through the Internet, television, newspapers, magazines, or any other specific medium is irrelevant.
However, what is critical to our being informed is the existence of well-paid professional news gatherers, writers, and editors. The current turbulence in the media business seems to be becoming an opportunity for large media conglomerates to dump those news gatherers, writers, and editors, who, in their view, constitute only a cost to their bottom lines and an annoyance to their political and business interests.
I wish you were more unconventional, because then you might realize this popular opinion you just spouted is wrong. Very wrong.
The top news program on Fox News gets half a million viewers on a good night.
Any given network news program gets at least SIX AND A HALF million viewers, every night.
Because this is Great Debates… Cite?
I’m not asking you to provide an analysis of an event that you disagree with, or to indicate that a TV news program is not providing you with all the information (indeed, given the very nature of the medium, it’s impossible, not to mention stultifyingly boring, to provide an audience with all the information. Even history textbooks don’t do that.)
There are news stories and there are news stories. I gave up reading the New York Times when I was living in New York, because you’d be 13 paragraphs into reading a biographical profile of someone before learning they were killed by a hit and run cab driver on 53rd and Park the day before.
Okay, so it isn’t clear what you are asking for, exactly. I have gone through all this just recently in GD, in some such or another thread on the media.
I would, for a thumbnail sketch, just point to the NYT’s own mea culpa re: their coverage of the run up to the war and Bill Moyers’ documentary “Buying the War,” as well as the recent incident regarding Joe Klein’s coverage of the FISA issue for Time Magazine, and Time’s handling of the problems created by his mistakes.
It is exactly such airy dismissals (at the time when it would have mattered, that is) by the legacy media of its responsibilities that has precipitated the thoughts on which the OP was based.
Part of the blame has to fall on the 24 hour news cycle, which forces the various networks and programs to manufacture news if they can’t find it.
My personal peeve with television news coverage this time around is how they’re handling the election. When’s the last time you heard a news person ask a candidate a substantive policy question? All the questions are about the process of being elected. John Edwards or Fred Thompson or Barack Obama can release a 10 page policy paper and hold a press conference to explain it, and the only questions will be, “Senator, do you think a black man can win?” - “Senator, what do you say to those who say you have no fire in the belly?” - Senator, do you think the haircut issue will hurt your campaign?" - “Senator, one of 50 daily polls we commission shows you trailing by 2 points in Iowa. What does that mean to your campaign?”
In short, it’s being covered like a sporting event instead of the process of choosing the leader of the free world. It’s reality TV. “SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY! The smackdown for the White House continues!”
Plus, there are so many correspondents now that the average quality seems to have declined dramatically from what it was 20 years ago. Many of these new TV journalists seem to be drooling idiots.
Anyway, the market is casting its judgement as well. TV is losing mindshare at a phenomenal clip. There are just so many better sources of information, and the Internet makes them just as accessible.
Absolutely! They can’t even help but talk about it using metaphors like “so-and-so really landed a punch there…”
I know many people hate it when I point out just how awful NPR is, but, and I am not kidding about this, they literally included the sound of a bell from a boxing match while summarizing a debate recently.
I’d love for them to be comparing or contrasting the relative strengths and weaknesses of candidates positions, but at this point I’d settle for them evaluating even one candidate’s positions, or even mentioning what they are.
The problem is that we are getting our information from stupid people who are just trying to follow the scent of the “narrative,” and who are fawning over or rejecting candidates as if they were back in junior high school.
I’m one of those people. I recently got back into producing TV news after being out of the business for a while.
Media companies, like most others, are trying to cut back on their payroll. However, they can’t get rid of us all or there will be no content to put between the commercials. Photographers are becoming a thing of the past in many newsrooms as the reporters are required to be “VJ’s” or videojournalists. Luckily for them, the cameras are smaller than they used to be. Some newsrooms are now getting by on three reporters when there used to be five.
But there will always be work for producers. I come into work with a blank slate every day and it’s my job to fill it with information that will attract and hold viewers.
Finally, I hate to disappoint those of you who cling to the idea that “corporate america” is “controlling the flow of information”…but I’ve produced almost a thousand hours of live news so far and I have never had a “corporate minion” demand that I add or take anything out of a newscast.
Unless I’m misinterpreting, this indicates that you think there is a content gatekeeper between me and the air. That’s not the case. Nobody approves my story selection or any other editorial content before air.
That said, part of being a good producer is separating your own views and interests from that of your viewing audience. I like politics and hate entertainment news, for example. But I would have been professionally stupid not to put in a package on Britney Spears’ breakdown.
There are a lot of factors that go into deciding what stories get promoted before the newscast and what goes into the newscast itself. They include locality (local news that’s unavailable nationally), target audience, lead-in (the show prior to the newscast) and many other factors.
My job is to produce a show that is considered interesting and relevant by as many people as possible. If I’m working for a FOX station, am I going to put in a story about Jordin Sparks getting a tattoo? Of course. If I’m at an NBC affiliate on “ER” night, am I going to tease a medical story if I have one? Yep.
Story selection is a combination of journalism, marketing and common sense.
I think this is a perfect example of how institutional bias works. Those of us who have any knowledge of how the media business works, don’t believe that you face organized censorship telling you to distract the masses from the real issues so that they can manipulate the government as they see fit.
But the ownership of media outlets by large conglomerates – exactly how you illustrate – results in the trivialization and the infantilization of the news business.
In the end, yeah, you’re making logical professional and business decisions. But in the big picture, what you’re doing (in Jon Stewart’s words) is hurting America.
Please elaborate. I’m interested in what you mean about “hurting america”.
I’m going to speculate on what you may mean in the meantime. If you’re referring to putting in news on Britney Spears, to me it’s a “chicken and egg” question. Are viewers more shallow and gravitating toward “infotainment” and TV is chasing them…or has TV started to turn to infotainment and the viewers have followed?
I think in general that society is dumbing down and that TV is simply following the eyeballs. Can that be changed? Perhaps…if TV news begins to increase the intellectual content and hope viewers will follow. But who is willing to take the ratings hit while waiting for that to happen? I’ll bet you can guess the answer to that one.
What I mean in a general sense is that serious news is important in maintaining a healthy democracy. Presenting gossip or trivia and calling it news results in a less informed public.
(1) A news program should be a news program. Information about Britney Spears’s meltdown isn’t news; it’s gossip. There are separate outlets for gossip. If you are producing a news show, including gossip about Spears shouldn’t even enter into your head. That’s trivialization and infantilization of news. And it serves to further erase the line between news and gossip.
(2) What entertainment shows your channel is showing should never, never, never, never influence what you decide to put on as news. That violates a basic ethic of journalism. There should be an absolute break – what we used to call a Chinese wall – between the news division and the entertainment division.
Really, what we need more of is news organizations whose sole business interest is news. The fact that these media conglomerates have so many other business interests serves only to harm the quality of news.
I agree with you in general, however the reality of the day is calling the tune.
With so many other entertainment options available and given the high level of interest in all things Spears, it would have been a mistake to exclude her from my newscast. Many people watching that night had a high level of interest in it. Being able to show them five seconds of her on a stretcher in a primetime tease assures that at least some of them will watch the newscast.
Consideration of the lead-in audience is basic producing. We look at the perceived audience from a demographic and interest basis and try to tease something that would interest them and hold them over into the newscast.
Again, the realities of the media business today make this impossible. There is a saying among some in the news business that “you bring them in with what they want to hear and then you tell them what you need to hear”. In other words, you can show important stories to a shallow audience…as long as you give them Britney too.
How often is Fox News Pitted here? Why do socialists get upset when I say I read the Daily Mail? Why do right-wingers get upset when I say I read The Guardian? Why does Biased BBC monitor the BBC News so closely?
Britney Spears’ breakdown is a current event that people are interested in hearing about. Why shouldn’t a news program cover it? Newspapers include all kinds of things that aren’t “hard news”, why shouldn’t TV news programs?
And if there were to be a rule that TV news can only cover “real” news, who gets to decide what is and isn’t real news? Was the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal news, or gossip? What about the Ted Haggard or Larry Craig scandals? OJ Simpson’s arrest and trial?
I understood him to mean the gatekeeper is the one that hired you in the first place - you’re not censored because you’ve established that you’ll present a show that doesn’t need it.
But irresponsible to lead with it, or give it more play than the war or the economy or health care. Yet that’s what we get from the nets now.
That’s where the criticism of programming that is essentially entertainment and not news, yet is still called news, comes from. You can’t inform people while you’re pandering to them.
Anybody who wants celebrity gossip has many shows, even channels, available to indulge it. Why should it take over even part of the small remaining *serious * part of TV as well?
Campaign coverage, yes, is mostly horse-race and on-the-trail stuff, and at that primarily the scuttlebutt the beltway-bubble reporters tell each other, thereby making up the Conventional Wisdom, at the bar at the Wayfarer Hotel in Concord, NH. Well, to be fair, we’ve seen fewer “reports” this year set in front of that same fake palm tree in the lobby, by reporters who just want to get back to the next round of drinks than in years past, but there’s been less time for them too. But anyway, they do the easy stuff. They’re lazy. They don’t explore issues or candidate’s records in any depth, even though that’s what journalistic responsibility. as opposed to the entertainment-show pandering that rules instead, requires. Yes, I know there’s good reporting out there, but it just gets swamped by the superficialities.
The straight-faced defense of the stupidity of “news” programs today makes me sad. There are many, many, many things that people might be interested in, none of which are remotely close to being newsworthy. Nor should our understanding of our place in the world be influenced by the fact that NBC has decided to place a medical drama in a particular timeslot on a particular night. This is simply more evidence that conservatives’ concerns for moral issues are secondary to the pursuit of a dollar, and their concern for the content of today’s media is similarly a tissue paper construct.
Here’s Glenn Greenwald with more timely and insightful commentary, discussing Tom Brokaw’s suggestion that the media has no business trying to shape a narrative and stampede the electoral process. In response to Chris Matthews’ perplexity as to what they would spend their time doing in such a crazy world, Brokaw has the novel idea that they might cover the issues.
My vote: some newspapers are still important because their reporters still generate content, though they are having a hard time figuring out how to get paid for the content when others repeat it for free. Most television news programs seem to be important as an entertainment business, much like reality TV shows and programs like “Mythbusters” who sell explosions, but they don’t much seem to be important in the context of news, or what we thought news was 20 years ago. Some big organizations like CNN and MSNBC do appear to hold on to a role in generating news content, but meanwhile seem to be searching for themselves in the space between the old and the new.
But you also reinforce the notion that celebrity gossip is news and that by keeping up with celebrity gossip, you are an informed citizen. It’s the point that Jon Stewart made (about Crossfire) – you are presenting a vacuous catfight as news and it fools viewers into believing that they are somehow being informed.